Bringing the Mediterranean to the UK

Over the last 30 years, largely as a result of people taking holidays to different parts of the world, tastes in the types and varieties of food that are now eaten in the UK have changed dramatically.

One company that recognised this possibility is Dornack International, based in West Thurrock, Essex.
Way back in 1982, the founder of the company was talking over dinner with an Italian colleague when they came up with the idea of offering dairy and meat producers in Italy a way of delivering their products to the UK by temperature controlled transport. At the time, the UK market was just beginning to open up to different foods and so, from the small starting point of one truck of single pallets per week, the trade has now grown to 15 trucks per week.

General Manager Simon Goddard says, “Our typical customers are small restaurant chains, delicatessens and local distributors. There is a large number of ex-pat Italians in and around London and Italy is a country with a large number of small producers. We have simply put the two together and, in so doing, created a very successful business that continues to grow. We have over 50,000ft2 of storage space for up to 10,000 pallets of dry and ambient goods together with offsite facilities for our chilled and frozen storage.”

Dornack collect different food products to order from small and widely scattered producers in Italy, place them onto lorries and ship them to the UK. Here they are then broken down and consolidated into loads for individual customers. In the early days, customers would typically take a single pallet, but now this is increasing and they may take two or three and each will contain a range of products from the different Italian suppliers.

Simon adds, “We are now developing this service with producers in France and Spain but this is not the limit of our services as we also bring in products from right across the world, including The Far East and Australia. We can consolidate a load in France by Thursday and it will be in West Thurrock for Sunday and as far north as Scotland by Monday! Once the goods are in store, we build up loads to meet the demands of an individual customer. If they are within about 80 miles, then we use our own transport, but beyond this we use established networks.”

For further information please telephone 01708 686960.